The Contested Solidarities of Refugee Support in Germany: Actions between Humanitarian Help and Political Activism

• Applicant: Dr. Larissa Fleischmann
• Subject Area: Social and Cultural Anthropology and Ethnology
• Term: from 2020 to 2022
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 448887013

The aim is to publish the manuscript of my PhD thesis as a monograph at a publishing company (Springer VS or Transcript) in Order to make its findings available to an academic audience. The dissertation investigates the practices in support of refugees that emerged among German residents in the migration summer of 2015. At this point in time, thousands of migrants crossed the external borders of the European Union irregularly in their search for asylum, while the numbers of asylum seekers arriving in Germany increased sharply. This development mobilized an unprecedented number of German residents to "help". Aiming to contribute to the widely circulating notion of a German "Welcome Culture", they engaged in volunteering practices and founded new citizens' initiatives in support of refugees in numerous Corners of the country. The book analyses how these supportive practices developed in an ambivalent space between (supposedly) `apolitical' forms of humanitarian help and political activism.Empirically, the book builds an 20 months of ethnographic and qualitative fieldwork with various actors involved in the reception of asylum seekers in Southern Germany. Building an these rich insights, the book shows how practices in support of refugees are always intertwined with questions of power, leading to ambivalent, at times unintended effects ranging from a fulfilment of personal needs to a complicity in the governance of migration to political possibilities to bring about more inclusive ways of living-together in an age of intensified migration. In other words, helping refugees is situated and responds to the imaginaries and interests of different actors and individuals involved.Analytically, the book develops the concept of Contested Solidarities. This perspective interrogates the social imaginaries of those who offered help and support to refugees and argues that they are central to understanding the manifold practices of helping refugees and their diverse effects. With this perspective, the book contributes to (a) the conceptual understanding of the term solidarity in social anthropology and provides (b) an empirically grounded understanding of solidarity and its practices in migration societies.

• DFG Programme: Publication Grants